Battlereport: bioboyAT vs 2Pacalypse

This is a battle report from Match 1: Game 2 of the Torenhire Star League 2Pacalypse versus bioboyAT. I hope you guys will excuse me, I don't normally write Battle Reports, so the whole business is a little sketchy and weird.

In retrospect, I should have noticed something was wrong when we first started talking about the gas. Everything had been going pretty well until 2Pacalypse took his gas, but, in the early minutes of the game, it occurred to me that he was only mining with one probe. No big deal, this is an amateur league, of course there would be someone mining with just one probe at some stage.

To their credit, Kiante and Sayle went along with me, though having seen some of the VOD posted to YouTube I know now that he saw three probes mining even when I first asserted there was only one. It's nice of them not to have immediately called me on what must have been, to them, bullshit.



It wasn't until I noticed that 2Pacalypse had five or six probes idle in his natural that things started to get really strange. When I first mentioned it, I could almost hear the wheels turning in Sayle's head, something was failing to engage here, but I couldn't tell what it was. 2Pac was now up to six idle probes in his main, too. He was floating thousands of minerals, this was the play of a man who had wandered off. Could 2Pacalypse be AFK in the second match of the league?

Not so, as Sayle pointed out, my replay was bugged.



I listened while Sayle and Kiante casted a game I couldn't see happening, but whose major events seemed to have the occasional mirror in my game. Unfortunately, I started screenshotting late, missing some of those key moments, and many of the screenshots came out just 640x480 of flat balck. What did come out tells the harrowing tale of the PvZ game that never was.

There were moments of the sublime. At around the same time as Kiante/Sayle described 2Pac taking his third base, I watched as around half of 2Pac's Probes decided all at once that it would be a fine thing to be mining from the mineral-only expansion behind his main base.

Just before, bioboyAT had picked up an extra hatchery at the twelve o'clock, and that's where things got really interesting. bioboy's hatch began to take damage. I watched as it slowly haemorrhaged hit points. There was nothing attacking it, it was just taking damage at about the same rate as it should have been healing.



At the same time, the refinery at the twelve o'clock was taking damage even faster, though there was no indication of what might be dealing that damage. From time to time, the damage would stop, and it would begin to heal again, before taking more damage. This happened until the gas should have died, but in the strange, cyclical world of the bugged replay, the refinery bounced back to full health and began taking damage in slow increments all over again.

I watched in mute fascination, before realising that I'd been neglecting the rest of the game. Things had begun to look even more strange. bioboy was, in an alternate dimension, researching +3 Melee, and this was, for the first time in quite a while, reflected in my game.

As soon as +3 Melee finished up, it started again. He had a third evolution chamber on the way up too, though his second wasn't researching anything. It was an interesting build, and I'd have been curious to see where he was going with it. For the duration of the game I'd been watching, he'd never managed to push himself past seven or eight supply.

At around the sixteen-minute mark in the above video, I cut back to bioboy's third to see that the hatchery is almost dead, gouts of blood spraying from the refinery. I narrate the experience for Kiante and Sayle who are watching their own (sadly inadequate) battle unfold. The building explodes and from the geyser, with a glitchy animation similar to that with which a drone establishes a refinery, a probe emerges to attack the hatchery. With only eight supply, all of which tied up in drones, bioboy is defenseless.

Fortunately, the probe leaves after a minute or two, the hatchery lives.



In response to his opponent's low supply, 2Pac sent out five/six probe hit squads, roving the map, taking out bioboy's hatcheries, situated as they were, well away from minerals. It was an interesting tactic, but the worker hit-squad is stronger than usual in a bugged replay. These probes were cold, remorseless killers. Once they'd killed a hatchery, they painstakingly killed off the larvae it left behind.



Eventually, 2Pac's probes began to distance mine from the nine-o'clock, with one probe breaking away from his gas to go on the long journey, carrying his little green cube all the way there. There was a sort of nobility to it, but by the time he reached and mined the minerals, 2Pac would sound the end of the game



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